Juggling Clouds, Catching Rainbows?

Howard Bowland, vice president and general manager, Technology Services Support, HP Asia-Pacific & Japan talks about HP's foray in converged clouds and also on other issues that flank this air pocket like- services, complexity, managing workloads, outages, SDN, virtualization etc. Excerpts:

Why a converged Cloud in HP's basket?

Lately we have seen a shift in IT industry in India from single set-ups to open, converged infrastructures. We see it evolving into cloud-based side of workloads. In the past, customers decided based on where their applications were running but now a change with virtualization, multi-vendor integration etc is happening. It is bringing in simplicity and complexity. HP thought of responding to this change. You are either building a cloud or consuming it and we can help with applications and services to maintain, architect and implement as well as cater with offerings for public cloud. Indian CIO faces pressures and challenges to deliver better and faster and this new capability will help them do that. Cloud is more of a business decision these days and it is vital to support this environment when workloads are bursting out and coming in. Converged cloud services this area.

How does converged cloud juggle well different kind of workloads?

We understand that workloads can differ, internally and externally, as per a customer's environment. So we develop the technology around security and architecture well enough. There is no one-size-fits-all answer. Every need has different requirements. It is important for CIOs to understand the business context and regulatory environment. That's how a converged cloud becomes relevant and we can now figure out needs at enterprise grade with fluidity and agility.

Is virtualization more of a prefix here?

It is a pathway. But some may rather jump the technology curve, as per the footprint. It's typically a part of the journey.

Would converged clouds help confront concerns around outages and complexity?

Every 20 per cent jump in functionality gives you a 100 per cent rise in complexity, as I heard an analyst say about it. To create complex issues in IT department is sometimes a nature of new things. That's why we will try our best to inject as much simplification as we can, and yet meet expectations. About outages, well, the good part of the erstwhile physical world was that you could pin point at areas. Yet our product and support strengths ensure to meet service levels with an enterprise-grade experience and with adequate relationships with external providers.

So what kind of incumbents are your ambitions targeting now - legacy segments or virtualized layers?

What we see is that the shift to virtualization means democratization of access so that medium scale enterprises can have more options or the same level of options. So adoption is moving fast. The take-up in the market is looking pretty good. Medium level enterprises are transforming their portfolios, and at the same time, new segments are opening up. The market will stretch for different people in many ways.

Is the services component turning to be a clincher in the market? Unlike what we have seen in the past? And also from a sense of margins?

There is a visible transformation in the service part of the industry. The traditional, reactive flavor is now less valuable and less attractive to customers. High-value, productive services is the new buzz now. That's how we are making progressive announcements. We are also building in automation in the chain. Now when we talk of margins, the more differentiated an offering, the more value it commands. The equations are changing.

Any views on VPN, SDN etc? Their spillovers in this space?

They reflect a shift away from physical infrastructure. They also equip with the ability to optimize assets, and it is possible to a large extent with SDN. We have begun to use open standards to deliver new capabilities and it's a key starting move. SDN is going to be a key differentiator.

How does the open-genre or CloudStack part of industry action affect your traction?

It is an important element to give customers a choice and we have been evolving on integration of open standards in the solution with the ability to plug it in better.

First published in CIOL